As long as there have been products to sell and services to promote, forms of advertising for publicity have been developed. Many different advertising mediums have been used over the years including word of mouth, print, radio, and television, to name a few. As new mediums are created, methods to benefit from the different mediums quickly seem to follow, with advertising revenue generation being one important benefit.
Increasingly, the Internet is being used to provide advertisements to users “surfing the web.” An advertisement may be provided through web browsers with the advertisement appearing in a pop-up window, within, or surrounding requested content viewed on a web page. Advertisements are frequently linked to websites providing additional information on the product or service being advertised. By clicking on a displayed advertisement, revenue may be generated for the owner of the website being viewed when the advertisement is displayed (a “pay-per-click” model). Revenue may also be generated by keeping track of the number of times or duration in which the advertisement is displayed.
Free e-mail services typically are supported through advertisements being added to e-mails sent and received by e-mail account holders. In addition, an e-mail provider customarily receives revenue from advertisers whose ads appear in banners on the email website for account holders to view.
A relatively new concept that is related to free e-mail services is online faxing services. Online faxing services allow users to visit a website and create faxes by typing messages directly on the website, scanning paper documents, or attaching electronic documents to an electronic “fax” transmission. Other online faxing services operate as software on a users computer with capabilities similar to faxing services initiated from a website. At this time, advertisements that are displayed to a user, if any, occur only on the website where the fax is being generated and at the bottom of a coversheet provided with faxed documents for a recipient to view.